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On Retelling Fairy Tales in Pictures and Words
I've illustrated many different kinds of stories, but I've had great fun taking on some well-known fairy tales. The three I've done, Hansel and
Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Rapunzel, are all tales from the Brothers Grimm, although they have their own histories. There has been probably even more fun in learning about the stories than in illustrating
them.
One thing I've realized from reading about folk tales is that there aren't "authentic" or "original" versions—there is no
such thing. Stories are always in flux. Wherever a story comes from, it was the property of living storytellers who, even while repeating stories they knew, would be influenced by other stories. They might add a
detail, or weave together strands of this one and that one to make a story better, or to make a point. Which is just what a storyteller of today would do.
So in setting out to make a picture book of, say, "Rapunzel," I had to be a storyteller of today. I could have set the tale in any
time or place, historical or wildly fantastical. But I chose to make the settings about as real as possible, though not in the reality of today; rather, in Italy, in 1500, when people's clothes looked so
wonderful, and there really were princes. All good fantasies are grounded in the non-fantastical (think how solidly of-this-world Lewis Carroll's little Alice is, and how much of the delight of Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland comes through Wonderland's failure to meet her expectations). So I felt that providing the reader with a sense of a solid, historical world would heighten the experience of seeing, for
instance, a tower with 50 feet of red-gold hair hanging from it.
I don't remember the hair's exact length, or the tower's exact height. But while I was working on the book, it was important to keep those
numbers handy so that different views of the tower could be consistent, and to tell me how high the prince, or a horse, or the sorceress would be when standing next to it.
It might have been more
strictly factual than necessary to expect that the furniture, the architecture, the clothes and hairstyles, the objects lying on tables, all be consistent with a period and a place. Rapunzel's hand-mirror, an
important tool, had to be silvered, convex glass: mirrored flat glass was not produced in Italy before the 1530's, I believe. I could easily have cheated and given her an ordinary mirror, but doesn't the
specificity of this slightly strange household object bring some extra spark to the scene where the sorceress learns to her distress of Rapunzel's pregnancy?
The more specificity we feel in a story, in pictures or in text, the truer and more resonant that story becomes. We might have expected, given
their reputation, that fairy tales should be illustrated with pure flights of imagination. But pure imagination, if it existed, would never fly. I'll take the most absurd and impossible things, when I illustrate
them, with all the seriousness I would give a work of real history. That's what I hope will make it fly. There is no "authentic" version of a fairy tale like Rapunzel, but a good version should make
you feel that its authenticity is absolute. •
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About the Author:
Paul Zelinsky was born in Evanston, Illinois. He attended Yale University, where he took a course with Maurice Sendak, which later
inspired him to pursue a career in children's books. Afterwards he received a graduate degree in painting from Tyler School of Art, in Philadelphia and Rome. Paul Zelinsky lives in New York with his wife,
Deborah and their two daughters.
Some of Paul Zelinsky's books include:
Rapunzel (Dutton, 1997)
The Wheels on the Bus (Dutton, 1990)
Swamp Angel (by Anne Isaacs) (Dutton, 1994)
and three novels by Beverly Cleary, including Ralph S. Mouse
(William Morrow, 1982)
To contact this author or illustrator, please use the information for his or her publisher provided on our list of CBC member publishers.
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